America’s ‘Automotive City’, Detroit, has suffered its share of setbacks: the demise of car manufacturing, white flight, black flight, the economic crisis and a huge mountain of debt. Thousands of houses still stand derelict, inhabited by drugdealers or with trees growing through the roof. The city went bankrupt in 2013 – a blessing in disguise, as its 18 billion dollars of debt were erased. The city is on its way back up: downtown is undergoing a marked renaissance and Ford Motor Company, believe it or not, is actually returning to Detroit. Ford will be setting up a new mobility research center in Detroit’s beautiful old train station, which stood empty for decades.

In Detroit I made a video interview with the head of urban planning, Maurice Cox, about Detroit’s upturn – and what still remains to be done.

At the Designweek this year in Milan, Eindhoven’s Design Academy took us on a treasure hunt. They addressed big issues like fake news, basic income and value creation by going totally local, embedding their work at the liquor store, the market, the hardware shop, the newsstand.

Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, a.k.a. the Dutch design duo Studio Drift, are famous worldwide for their poetic works that mix technology with nature. They have their first solo exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam, from the 25th of April until 26th of August 2018, including well-known works such as Fragile Future, the Drifter, Shylight and Amplitude. Dutch journalist Tracy Metz got the chance to take a look at the making of the exhibition and interviewed Lonneke Gordijn.

Oosterwold, in the province of Flevoland, Netherlands, is a pioneering place where urban development is (almost) all in the hands of the residents.This means that the residents will not only get control of their own homes but also of industry, roads and paths, green areas, water and public areas. I took a look in this practice of organic urbanism.

SWEETS is 1 hotel consisting of 28 iconic bridge houses turned into hotel suites on the canals. I visited the hotel rooms and spoke to the artistic director Suzanne Oxenaar and architect Tjeerd Haccou of Space&Matter.

California, and especially Silicon Valley, has defined so much of our sense of freedom with design objects made there. But there is quite a big difference in what we define now as freedom from the sixties till now. The exhibition ‘California: Designing Freedom’ now on display at the Stedelijk Museum in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, shows this development. I visited the exhibition and interviewed Justin McGuirk, the curator.